I’ve added a recent post to the blog on my private practice web page regarding tips for working with depression – which include mindfulness exercises. If you of anyone you know has dealt with chronic low moods or depression this blog entry could be of interest to you.

It can be found by clicking here. (or visit: http://www.counselingfortransformation.com/2009/03/17/how-to-know-if-you-are-depressed/)

Warm Regards,

David

On this eve of the new year I’ve been thinking about intention. It is the tradition for many to set resolutions for the new year, which sounds a lot like goals – it seems like a bit of a set up for self-criticism and self-judgment if we fail to meet our often lofty (but well intentioned goals for ourselves). I know it has been for me in the past.  I like to approach a big transition like the beginning of 2009 with an intention or a set of intentions.  I define intention as a continuity of attention and energy that underlie both  inner and external manifestation and change.  This is differentiated from a goal or resolution as these predict a hard and fast, usually very solid outcome.  Our intention is more of an impulse that can guide action and behavior, though we don’t know exactly what the outcome will be….

There is no way we can fail at this.  We may forget our intention sometimes, but we can renew it at any time by coming back to it over and over again.  One of my intentions for the new year is to nurture and appreciate the many relationships in my life – with friends, family, loved ones, pets, and clients.  Basically with all the wonderful people in my life who share their generosity and big spirit with me.  I’m sure there will be days where I am engrossed in some intense situation with my work or personal life and I will neglect or take for granted certain relationships.  These kinds of days and situations happen.  I will just come back to the intention again, no need for judgment or self-flagellation, just reminding myself that in each moment I am empowered to change my intention redirect my awareness and energy and influence what and how my life manifests – in this case how I approach the relationships in my life.

We can use our intention as a kind of mindfulness practice – we come back to it again and again, if we forget we eventually wake up to our intentions and begin to let them filter back into our life through our feelings and thoughts and actions.  As we find we are distracted, we wake up again and again coming back to our conscious intentions.

As an aid to remembering,  I like to write down  my intention(s) in big letters on a piece of paper and post them somewhere I will see them every day as an aid to coming back and waking up to my intentions.

May you be blessed with contentment, peace, and courage in the coming new year.

Please enjoy the following streaming audio of a guided mindfulness and forgiveness exercise. This is part 2 of the practice I introduced a few days ago.

This practice will help you begin to unwind the chronic tension in the mind and body around unfinished business with a situation or memory in which you feel you have hurt someone else.

Please pick something of fairly low emotional intensity to work with at first (this is explained in more detail in the recording.) We want this to be a gentle compassionate process. This exercise has been a fruitful one for my clients and I hope it is helpful to you.

Please use your discretion when using any of the guided meditations/exercises I present here. If you ever feel overwhelmed or uncomfortable discontinue the exercise. The most effective way of working with this would be with the help or support of a qualified therapist. Keep in mind that forgiveness is a progressive process and you may not feel you can completely open to or arouse and kind of heartfelt quality of forgiveness during the exercise. Approach the person, situation, or memory with gentleness and take your time. Bit by bit, moment by moment, practice by practice we can learn to let go of our pain, resentment, rage, sadness, and other types of suffering. Regular practice is required to feel the full benefits of the exercise.

Therapists and healers please feel free to link this or distribute to your clients.

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed for the next 20 minutes or so and follow along with the audio.

This is also available streaming from my website, downloadable as an mp3, or you can subscribe to this as a podcast/feed from this page.

Shinzen Young, a wonderful teacher in the Vipassana lineage will be offering a non-residential meditation retreat in Broomfield, CO from February 14-16.

See this website for details on the event and how to register www.sierraretreats.org.

Please enjoy the following streaming audio of a guided mindfulness and forgiveness exercise. This practice will help you begin to unwind the chronic tension in the mind and body around unfinished business with a person you feel has hurt you. Please pick something of fairly low emotional intensity to work with at first (this is explained in more detail in the recording.) We want this to be a gentle compassionate process. This exercise has been a fruitful one for my clients and I hope it is helpful to you.

Please use your discretion when using any of the guided meditations/exercises I present here. If you ever feel overwhelmed or uncomfortable discontinue the exercise. The most effective way of working with this would be with the help or support of a qualified therapist. Keep in mind that forgiveness is a progressive process and you may not feel you can completely open to or arouse and kind of heartfelt quality of forgiveness during the exercise. Approach the person, situation, or memory with gentleness and take your time. Bit by bit, moment by moment, practice by practice we can learn to let go of our pain, resentment, rage, sadness, and other types of suffering. Regular practice is required to feel the full benefits of the exercise.

Therapists and healers please feel free to link this or distribute to your clients.

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed for the next 20 minutes or so and follow along with the audio.

This is also available streaming from my website, downloadable as an mp3, or you can subscribe to this as a podcast/feed from this page.

Forgiveness is at the heart of compassion for both ourselves and others.  We forgive ourselves a little bit each time we are able to bring our unconditional presence to whatever we have been avoiding in our lives, whether it is physical pain, a toxic relationship, an old emotional wound, anger or grief we never felt, someone who we feel has caused us pain, our perceived failures in our lives….it can look any way and there are so many things that we avoid in our lives.

The energy of forgiveness is spacious and soft, gentle and accepting. With the mindful approach we turn towards our pain, not away as is the habit for most.  I know that I am given so many opportunities to forgive in my mindfulness practice. Life gives us many opportunities as well. A re-occuring memory surfaces of how I hurt someone, or how I was hurt along with the inner dialogue and the painful contraction, perhaps anger or rage, perhaps sadness or despair.  We welcome all of it with open arms.  We let it into our awareness, even if just for a brief period. We are beginning to connect with the core experience of what we have avoided. 

If avoidance arises, how does it arise? It is part of the nature of the conditioned human mind that we avoid pain and seek comfort or pleasure. This is samsara, the endless cycle of suffering that mindfulness meditation is meant to be an antidote for. This avoidance can look many ways. Perhaps we are in so much pain we turn to food, to TV, to drugs or alcohol, to a new relationship, to pornography, or shopping to try and erase the pain. We bury it and it surfaces again and again. The compassionate way is to gentle turn toward our suffering and let it in little by little. Get to know it. Treat it as a welcome guest rather than a villain who we must keep out at all costs.

These memories and experiences in life and in our practice arise as doors opening, or brief and auspicious arising for opportunities to forgive ourselves and others.  We can begin this process by aligning our mindfulness or intention to open to the whole experience with this unconditional acceptance and take the experience however it arises, as sadness, rage, anger, joy, bitterness, despair, anxiety, excitement…..whatever it is we let it come, and we let go into it moment by moment, breath by breath.

Each time we begin our meditation practice we can set this intention for forgiving ourselves and others. I do this by repeating these phrases silently to myself from the Brahma Viharas on Conciliation and Atonement at the beginning of each formal practice period.

If there is any way I have harmed myself, either knowingly or unknowingly,
through action of body, speech, or mind, I ask forgiveness.
If there is any way I have suffered harm by reason of anything I have thought, or said, or done,
I forgive myself.
If there is any way I have harmed another, either on purpose or by accident,
by reason of anything I have thought, or said, or done, I ask forgiveness.
If there is any way another has harmed me, either knowingly or unknowingly,
through action of body, speech, or mind, I forgive them.

A useful mindfulness of body exercise that helps us get a sense of our internal landscape and the physical and emotional sensations going on in this moment is the known as the body scan.

I often use this excercise as a way to take pause and get back in touch with myself in the present moment. It is a nice way to ground and center yourself. I also suggest it to clients as way to get grounding back after an upsetting or destabilizing event or situation.

We can do this by lying down or standing up.  I suppose any posture is ok for this exercise, but the lying down or standing up are the most conducive to feeling the whole body in my opinon.

We simply start at the crown of the head or the bottoms of the feet and slowly scan our attention (upward or downward depending on where you are starting).  We want to feel deeply into the body.  Feeling soft tissue, ligaments, and even bone. Noticing blood flow, tension or relaxation, areas of numbness int he body. Whatever is present in the body in that moment is what we notice.  We move sequentially, so if we were starting in the feet we would slowly move upwards: feet, lower legs, knees, upper legs, pelvic region, lower back, stomach, upper/mid back, chest shoulders, arms, hands, neck, face and head.  Spending a few moments in each area deepening and soaking awareness into whatever is present.

This can be a very quick practice perhaps finished in ten breaths, or we may linger for a few minutes or more in each body part.

Often, there are interruptions to our practice, or at least our formal practice.

Interruption, does not mean we have to throw away the whole practice, or castigate ourselves. It is an unhelpful habit to think that ‘I am a failure’, and to somehow feel negatively towards ourselves because our formal practice has fallen away. Of course if this thought comes up, we can choose to let it go, rather than indulge it and show some self-compassion. We can pick up again at any time, whether this means practice of mindfulness meditation on the cushion/chair, or ‘practice in life.’

At any moment we can pick up again our chosen practice and give it our wholehearted effort, even if it has been 3 days, a week, a month or 10 years since we last practiced. In the Buddhist tradition there is a concept of Merit. Merit is accumulated as we practice and does not diminish over time. Our ability to sit with ourselves and all of our experiences and the spiritual strength we have developed will still be there when we come back to our old or new friend, mindfulness meditation.

Fresh start is a particular and very useful technique taught to me by one of my teachers from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. When we sit and things become chaotic, our thoughts are wild and out of control, our body hurts, we feel we are unable to attend to our breath for even a moment, we can just stop everything. As she would say ‘drop the whole project.’ Change your posture, relax, unfurl the legs, open the eyes look outward and just be. When we feel ready we can resume without any guilt, self-criticism and judgement. Using this technique is like hitting the reset button. We start all over again and only what is happening in the present is real, and that is what we choose to relate to.

Fresh start is a great perspective for life. At any moment we can just drop the whole project, letting go of fear, hatred, bored, excitement, worry, grief, guilty, anxiety, or any other experience. We don’t need to cling so tight. Just open the eyes and the senses, take in the outer world, your present experience and start again and again. Each moment arises and passes away.

Taking just a moment of our day to stop and feel can be a wonderful practice. There is a sense of coming home, of groundedness and giving ourselves a momentary respite of spacious silence. To do this find a place where you won’t be disturbed …the bathroom will do if you are in public or at work. Take three or four deep breaths feeling the sensations of your breath in the body. Slowly scan through the body from the feet to the crown of the head. Take another few breaths, open your eyes, and continue with your day. I like to do this when things seem to be taking on a chaotic energy of their own in my life and it is often just what I need to slow down just a little bit, release a bit of stress/tension, and have a more balanced perspective.

Sometimes mindfulness meditation feels pleasurable, we enter into deep states of stillness or we encounter body sensations of peace and a sense of groundedness. Other times it feels very difficult, encountering anxiety, restlessness, sadness, frustration, anger/rage, or any other type of intense sensory experience that can be accompanied by compelling and painful thoughts. At these times we are essentially, as one of my teachers puts it, ‘punching the time card.’ We are doing our time on the cushion and trying the best we can stay with our object of meditation whether that might be the breath, mantra, body sensations, etc. It is important not to be too hard on yourself and to just do the practice. We may feel we will never have a ‘good meditation’ again. Usually this means a quiet or peaceful state. In my opinion the ‘good’ meditation is the one we do. The only ‘bad’ meditation is the one we don’t do. So it is important to persist here and attempt to stay with the object of the meditation and sit or practice (if you are doing an alternative practice) for the time we have committed to. Over time and with practice this difficulty will arise and pass away and we will be more familiar with our own experience. We may feel that nothing is happening as we practice and find ourselves swept up in thought or emotion/sensation. There is a very subtle process at work here that will allow us to become more concentrated and centered as we simply allow ourselves to sit engage with our experience with an unconditional attitude of acceptance. Don’t just take my word for it, check this out and ‘do your time’ on the cushion or with whatever practice you have chosen. Whether it is for 5, 10, 20, 45 minutes – stay with a regular practice over time and see what you notice….